


the anonymity of ronan lynch

by grapevine_fires



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Cabeswater - Freeform, Crying, Dreaming, Emotional Ronan Lynch, Fluff, Ghost Noah Czerny, M/M, Maybe smut? who knows, Nerd Richard Gansey III, Panic Attacks, Ronan Lynch is Bad at Feelings, Ronan Lynch-centric, do i need to tag crying, i love ronan lynch if you couldn't tell, i promise this is a ronan/adam fic you just gotta stick with it, i will add more tags, just like heaven by the cure okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:47:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29563497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapevine_fires/pseuds/grapevine_fires
Summary: Nights left by himself were dark, terrible, dangerous, and thrilling things, and Ronan Lynch could not get enough of them.Gansey is beautiful and grand and alive.Adam is collected and safe and human.Noah is calm and youthful and transparent.Ronan seems to be going through various phases of lost and found and lost again.
Relationships: Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	the anonymity of ronan lynch

**Author's Note:**

> hello! thank you for reading my fic! this is my first serious one, so please forgive any errors.

Nights left by himself were dark, terrible, dangerous, and thrilling things, and Ronan Lynch could not get enough of them.

Virginia air held a weight to it, one that could not be replicated anywhere else, and it intensified in the dark. It seeped down from the mountains and swirled around the streetlamps of Henrietta, pouring through the streets and pressing up against the glass windows of the houses and bookshops of the town. This heaviness, this gravity within the air drifted in the open windows of his car, and as he breathed in and out, Ronan was high on it.

He held his arm out of his car window, cigarette dangling from his fingertips. Gansey would not approve.

Then again, Gansey would not approve of his BMW idling on the side of the road, a mere minutes walk from Cabeswater, or the open beer in the cupholder, or the digital clock reading 3:34 AM, usually.

Ronan took a drag from the cigarette. He didn’t care.

In all honesty, he didn’t really know what he was doing here.

The sky looked angry and threatening, though not as angry as before; the storm clouds were rolling out, revealing a clear night and the sounds of distant thunder. The earth smelled like rain. Cold drafts mixed in with the sticky summer humidity, a telling of the nearby Cabeswater. Ronan felt hyper-aware of its presence, his mind a scope trained on the one thing that mattered. Cabeswater at night was not a place to misunderstand; it was dangerous, but Ronan needed some danger right about now. He couldn’t get the image of Gansey’s shocked eyes out of his head. Ronan blew a thin line of smoke at the stars, daring them to question him.

It felt like the kind of night where his very existence was in question.

Something inside him urged him to prove it.

 _Go to sleep_ , Gansey had said, _we can talk in the morning_. They both knew that was an empty suggestion.

If they both could have been able to sleep, they wouldn’t have been Ronan and Gansey.

If they both could have been able to sleep, it wouldn’t have happened.

If they both could have been able to sleep, Ronan wouldn’t be sitting alone in his car outside of Cabeswater at 3:34 AM, staring at a resentful sky.

\----

_“The world is both an enigmatic and mundane thing and I am here!” Gansey shouted, spinning and leaping haphazardly around the main room of Monmouth Manufacturing, knocking glasses off of tables and kicking every object he stumbled upon, the bottle in his hand spilling beer across the floor while he spun. “I cannot become more me than I am!”_

_Boy, did Ronan agree with that. Although he hadn’t seen much of Gansey’s childhood, he imagined this free and chaotic Gansey was what he must have seemed like before the world told him to carry its weight._

_This Gansey gave off the impression that he had created the ideas of poetry and art and music, and he was reveling in his inventions; he was a wonder._

_Ronan was taken._

_They didn’t usually drink together: Gansey didn’t usually drink at all, Ronan preferred solitude during the derangement of senses, but tonight had so much raw, euphoric not-right-ness that it seemed as though the normal rules by which they held themselves didn’t apply._

_After Gansey had come back from his week-long trip in D.C. and collapsed on the old, impulse-bought couch where Ronan and Noah were spread out. Ronan could see the young man who had so much potential and will make such a good Congressman after your mother someday, you know, melting off of him. He had sagged against the couch, and Ronan, jokingly, had offered him the rest of his open beer._

_Gansey had taken it._

_And now here they were, Gansey, spinning, Ronan, watching, Noah, long gone with a disapproving shake of his head._

_“Cool it, man, you’re gonna break shit,” Ronan said, and moved from the stretched-out position on the couch to a more controlled perch on an armchair so as to watch the destruction before him. Normally he wouldn’t care what got broken, but he was apprehensive of what the Gansey that tomorrow brought would say._

_Gansey paused in his spinning and pranced across the room, hopping over the miniature Henrietta Hardware & Paint, and strolled down Main Street towards Ronan. Leaning in, he said in a voice that was both so un-Gansey and so truly Gansey that it made Ronan dizzy.“Don’t you know, dear friend, that I’m rich? I can afford to quote-unquote 'break shit'.” _

_There was a light, playful lilt to his voice and a shit-eating grin in his eyes, so full of boyhood and swagger that Ronan knew would disappear with the sun._

_“Oh, yeah, right,” Ronan said, a lazy smile creeping back across his face. He liked this; the teasing and recklessness. “Must have slipped my mind.”_

_“Of course, of course― OH!” Gansey exclaimed, shouting so loudly and abruptly that Ronan put a hand on the couch behind him to brace himself. “You know what we need? MUSIC!”_

_Gansey went to the record player, mumbling something about how music was the foundation of all love in the universe, and picked out an album by The Cure that was almost definitely first edition or had a record case signed by one of the members of the band or some other unknown, lavish thing that he would never boast about._

_As Gansey put the needle on the record and the music started to crackle out of the speakers, old and full of life and sex and the ignominy of youth, something clicked in Ronan._

_Gansey was not drunk. Ronan was not either, having sacrificed the majority of his beer to Gansey and Noah before the ghost had evaporated (rude), but this was beside the point. Gansey was not drunk._

_He knew this because of all the times at two or three or four AM Ronan had tried to play something or other on the record player, needing to drown out K’s voice from the back of his head, and had failed, miserably, at putting the needle on the record. As much as he had tried it, his fingers had trembled and trembled and the needle had skipped and skipped._

_It was objectively impossible; either Gansey possessed superhuman precision and depth perception, or a very high liquor tolerance._

_Watching Gansey across the room misjudge his dancing skills, stumble over the leg of the pool table, fall to the floor and abruptly attempt to right himself before standing again, Ronan concluded it was the latter. Gansey, seemingly over his small conflict with the floor, had resumed a sort of half dance, half spin, and was in the process of making Monmouth Manufacturing unrecognizable._

Why the show, then? _Ronan wondered. Or was it not a show, but a release? Gansey looked free, youthful in his dancing and singing._

She threw her arms around my neck!

Show me how you do it and I promise you,

I promise that I’ll run away with you.

_He had his eyes closed, lips mouthing the words._

_Ronan couldn’t handle it._

_Setting down his empty bottle, he strode across the room and grabbed Gansey by the arm._

_“Yes! Yes, Ronan, join me! Life is so real! Isn’t it― Isn’t―” He scrabbled at Ronan’s shirt, pulling enthusiastically at the fabric, trying to get Ronan to move his arms, to sway, something. “It’s all right here, Ronan!”_

_It was. Ronan was breathtaken by this surreal Gansey, Gansey-on-fire. He moved._

_“You’re crazy.” Ronan looked at the ceiling, then at the floor, at the pool table, at the roofless miniature Henrietta, and wrapped an arm around Gansey’s waist._

_This. This was enough. This closeness, this hand-on-cloth-on-skin._

_“Slow dancing, are we?” Gansey, misreading as always, reached a hand to rest on Ronan’s shoulder._

_“No. We’re not.” He held Gansey closer, and suddenly this wasn’t enough, it couldn’t be enough because he was_ right here _._

_He leaned in, and this was it. This was the thing that would raise Ronan from the torment that chipped away at him. Gansey’s hand was on his neck and his face now and he was kissing back and it was, god it was everything and―_

_It was over._

_“No,” Gansey said, smiling lightly through his shocked expression, pulling back, “You’re not― I’m not― We― No.”_

_Ronan just looked at him, blankly, feeling the cool, missing feeling that comes with a hand hastily withdrawn from his cheek._

_“You’re drunk. We’re drunk.” They both knew this was a lie; if anything, they had been too entranced within the world to think straight._

_“_ _You really don’t feel it?” Ronan asked softly, doing the most he could to keep the edge of pleading from his voice, “You really don’t feel this― This―” Magnetism. The pull of the mint-scented, book-scented, Gansey-scented life._

_Gansey laughed, and Ronan wanted to leave. But he didn’t, he stayed, as he always did, for Gansey._

_“You don’t know what you’re saying.”_

_“No, No. I do, and I always do and you always push me away and I can’t fucking do this man, you’re― Fuck.” It was sinking in now, the loss. What had been irreplaceable and now would need to be replaced._

_A different sort of look came across Gansey’s face; an understanding of sorts, and Ronan wanted to hit him._

_“Go to sleep,” Gansey said, comforting and composed, wearing the same face he showed to the congressmen and their wives, “we can talk in the morning.”_

_Ronan had looked at him. Really looked at him, deep into his eyes and searching for something, anything. Without a second thought, he turned around, grabbed his jacket off of the hook in the hall, keys jingling in its pocket, and left._

\----

Sighing, Ronan went to tap the ash off of his cigarette into the cupholder and swore when the embers burned his finger. The cigarette had burned down to the filter.

 _No time like the present,_ Ronan thought, and the Gansey-ism knocked something off of a shelf inside him. He righted his jacket on his shoulders, put out the cigarette, took one last swig of his beer, and opened the car door, pulling himself out into the night.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm planning on continuing this, but let me know if you want the second chapter to be posted! i love you for reading this!


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